Install and Use Stratis to Manage Local Storage on RHEL 8 / Fedora

Stratis is a local storage-management solution for Linux focused on simplicity and ease of use. It uses Linux’s devicemapper subsystem and the XFS filesystem. Stratis also gives you access to advanced storage features such as:

Thin provisioning

File system snapshots

Pool-based management

Monitoring.

As a system administrator, you can easily set up new storage and manage complex storage configurations integrated by the Stratis high-level system. It is a hybrid user-and-kernel local storage management system that uses the concept of a storage pool.

Stratis Terminologies

When working with Stratis, you’ll often come across the following terminologies:

blockdev: This is a block device, such as a disk or a disk partition.

pool: A pool is composed of one or more block devices with a fixed total size, equal to the size of the block devices.

filesystem: Each pool can contain one or more file systems, which store files. A filesystem does not have a fixed total size since it is thinly provisioned. If the size of the data approaches the virtual size of the file system, Stratis grows the thin volume and the file system automatically.

Stratis pools are located under the /dev/stratis/<poolname> directory.

Stratis Supported devices

Stratis works with the following block devices:

iSCSI

LVM logical volumes

Device Mapper Multipath

hard drives

LUKS

SSDs

NVMe storage devices

mdraid

Stratis Software components

Stratis provides two software components:

stratisd daemon: This manages collections of block devices, and provides a D-Bus API.

stratis-cli: This provides a command-line tool stratis which itself uses the D-Bus API to communicate with stratisd.

Step 1: Install Stratis on RHEL 8

RHEL 8 is distributed withstratisd and stratis-cli which can be easily installed using yum package management tool.

You have learned how to install and use Stratis to manage layered local storage on RHEL 8 and Fedora Linux distributions. My next articles will cover the installation and usage of Stratis on CentOS 7, Debian and Ubuntu.